The lives of J.S. Bach (1685-1750) and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1806-1847) were separated by decades and vast changes in musical style. Nonetheless, the music and legacies of the Baroque master and the brilliant early Romantic composer are forever intertwined, historically and stylistically.
J.S. Bach’s art summed up everything that defined the Baroque era, even as the world of music was transitioning to the Classical. He was, in a sense, old school; even his composer sons, such as J.C. and C.P.E. Bach, had moved on. The world of musical fashions and preferences could have left J.S. Bach’s compositions collecting dust forever after his passing. Instead, interest in his music was kept alive by his keyboard music and publications about his life. However, German musicians – and in particular Felix Mendelssohn’s family – were responsible for renewing interest in Bach’s great choral works, beginning with the St. Matthew Passion. Felix Mendelssohn’s own work, in this program of “Resolution and Renewal,” shows how deeply his sacred works were influenced by J.S. Bach. The Vespergesang, Op. 121, with its Baroque-style bass, counterpoint, and chorale setting, among other features, is an exemplary Bach-style sacred cantata structure.
Of course Mendelssohn did not stand still stylistically. His music took on the expanded vocabulary and orchestral colors of Romanticism. While capturing the spirit of Shakespeare in his incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his setting of Psalm 115, still indebted to Bach, looks ahead as well. Bach’s summing-up, his resolution of what “Baroque” means, took on new depth in Felix Mendelssohn’s renewal, which was not about mere imitation, but about growth as well.